The classic game – so widely known we won’t bother to reproduce the rules here – dates back to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) when it was called shoushiling, with each ‘weapon’ having a 33 per cent chance of success.

Engineers at the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo may have just ruined it for turn-based hand game fans everywhere however, creating a robot that can win 100 per cent of the time.

The machine can detect within a millisecond what shape your hand is about to make, pre-empting it with the winning gesture.